Before she escaped her mid-thirties, Rebecca Soffer lost both of her parents. The Austinite had trouble finding resources that spoke to her about how to cope with her loss after her mother died in a car wreck when she was 30, and again when her father died of a heart attack four years later.

So Soffer and a friend who’d also experienced tragedy at a young age decided to start their own resource – a website called Modern Loss.

“In the interim period between the two of their deaths, I was so lonely, and I found that a lot of people really don’t want to talk about death,” Soffer says. “I didn’t even want to talk about death, I just wanted to talk about the loss.”

Soffer says that she didn’t find what she needed, so she created her own website to fill the void.

“In my personal experience, I wanted soenthing that was not really religious, that was really not so clinical and wasn’t judgmental,” she says. “And I just wanted to read a piece about somebody’s real mess, our site really aims to share people’s stories.”

Modern Loss shares first-person essays about people’s experiences with loss, as well as other resources.

“It’s not a Chicken Soup book,” she says. “It acknowledges that you can still like humor and color and laughing and also be living with loss. It doesn’t make you disrespectful, you’re still you.”